Are you getting low email open rates?
It’s one of the most annoying feelings out there.
Nothing else makes me want to pull out my hair in frustration than spending a good amount of time writing an email only for it to get a horrible open rate.
Over the years, I have figured out why this happens and in this post, I am going to list out some of the most common reasons why your email rates are low and how you can rectify your situation.
- Your Subject Lines Are Not Enticing Enough
This is usually the BIGGEST and most common reason for low open rates.
The purpose of a subject line is to grab the attention of your subscribers and get them to OPEN your email.
There are several TYPES of subject lines that you can use to improve your open rates:
- Curiosity Based Subject Lines
As the name suggests, the focus of this approach is in getting your subscribers curious enough to open your emails.
For example:
“I can’t believe this failed”
“I got so many sales but still wanted to cry”
“Holy hell, I am going to KILL that guy”
Make sure you tie up your subject line with your email copy in a proper way so that your subscribers don’t feel tricked when they read your email.
Curiosity works great but don’t overdo it as testing shows that subscribers get tired if you keep sending them emails with clickbait subject lines.
- Self Interest Subject Lines
In this approach, the focus is in offering your subscribers a direct benefit for opening your email.
“Want 67+ leads per day with Facebook Ads?”
“Get My 6 Step Solo Ads Formula”
“Here’s My 12 Step Webinar Template That Made Me Millions”
- Question Based Subject Lines
The simplest and fastest way to get someone’s attention is to simply ask a question. A question opens up a mental thought process and when your subject line asks a question, your subscribers will open your email to complete their thought process.
“Are you disappointed with your funnel?”
“Want to know why you are not getting MTTB sales?”
“Which funnels works best for Facebook Ads?”
- Time Sensitive Subject Lines
As the name suggests, the focus is on letting people know about the deadlines so that they would take action faster.
“12 Hours To Go Before The Price Rises”
“My Traffic Mastery Intensive Closes Down In 2 Days”
“643+ leads per day masterclass starts in 1 hour”
- Social Proof Subject Lines
When you mention things about customer results and endorsements in your subject lines, you will get the attention of your subscribers.
“She made $182,632 in 12 months with this system”
“Daegan Smith calls me the secret weapon of industry leaders”
“Paul used my webinar formula to make $22,000 in 1 day”
- News Based Subject Lines
When you mention a news event or some controversy in your subject lines, you will get a huge bump in your open rates. Of course, as I mentioned before, you need to properly tie up your subject line with the content of your email so that people don’t feel tricked.
“Hillary vs Donald Trump – what a joke this has reduced to”
“What I learned from Usain Bolt’s final Olympic victory”
“Why I am not surprised by Brangelina’s split?”
As you can see, the above list of subject lines should help you get a lot of ideas. This is by no means a comprehensive list but it’s good enough to get you started.
- Your Emails Are Not Interesting Enough
Believe it or not, your email quality has a certain impact on your open rates.
If you write boring emails that puts everyone to sleep, then sooner or later your subscribers are going to mentally tune out and no amount of crazy good subject lines will help you get better opens.
What you really need to do is write emails in a fun and entertaining manner. The best way to do that is by writing it in a casual conversational tone which is easy to read and consume (notice how I write my emails and blog posts).
Also don’t fall into the trap of writing heavy duty content emails that take a long time to consume.
Sending those kind of emails once in a while is ok but if you were to send them regularly, people will tune out.
The best approach is to give a bit of value in every email along with a story or anecdote or opinion or rant and then tie it all up with the promotion of your product.
Value + Entertainment + Selling = Fun Filled Emails That People Want To Read
When you send out such emails, a certain section of your subscribers will become your fans and look forward to your emails. These people would open your emails regardless of your subject line.
- Avoid Using Spam Trigger Words In Your Subject Line & Body Copy
Services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc have a huge list of trigger words which when used in a certain way makes them flag your email as spam.
Avoid using words like:
“Get rich quick”
“Make millions”
“Lose weight fast”
Search on Google to get a huge list of spam trigger words.
It’s not like if you use any of the trigger words, your emails would be marked as spam. It may or may not happen but the odds of it happening increases if you use such words.
So avoid using them as much as possible OR misspell them (if you have to absolutely use them).
- Segment Your List & Resend Unopened Emails Again
Most marketers overlook this yet it can dramatically boost up your open rates.
Everyone in your list won’t have the same level of interests for every topic.
For example, if you are building a list in the internet marketing niche:
Some of your subscribers may show more interest in getting emails about traffic generation.
Some may be specifically interested in a particular traffic method like Facebook or Youtube or Solo Ads.
Some may show more interest in getting emails on how to build funnels.
Some may show more interest in learning about webinars.
Some may show more interest in creating products.
And the list goes on.
If you focus on sending only generic emails to all, your open rates won’t be as high as they should be.
However if you segment different subscribers by their interests and send them emails pertaining to their interest, your open rates will shoot up.
You can segment your subscribers by sending them a bunch of links (about different topics) and asking them to click the ones that they are interested in. You can them segment your subscribers based on the links they click.
Another approach that is proven to increase open rates is resending emails to subscribers who didn’t open your previous emails. Sometimes, life gets in the way and people may not notice your email in their inbox or they may have forgotten to get back to it.
So when you resend your emails to those subscribers who haven’t opened your previous email, you get another shot at reaching out to them and this way you can get more opens, clicks and sales.
- Check If Your Autoresponder Service Is Facing An Issue
99% of the times, this is NOT an issue.
But from time to time, the deliverability of autoresponder services can go awry (there are many technical reasons for that) and it may take a while for them to get back their deliverability.
So check with other marketers in and outside your industry to see if they too are experiencing low open rates.
If it’s across board, then the problem is with the autorespnoder service in which case you may have to wait for a few days or weeks for it to settle down. If you want to maintain your open rates in the meanwhile, you can sign up for a different autoresponder service, upload your subscribers there and start mailing them from there.
Some of the famous autoresponder services are Aweber, Getresponse, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Sendlane, iContact.
In closing…
From my experience, I have found that if you have low email open rates, it’s due to one of these 5 reasons.
If you take corrective action based on what I have mentioned in this post, your open rates will improve in due course of time.
If you have destroyed your existing list with bad email marketing practices, then start driving traffic to a new list and start emailing them the right way. You will get good open rates from that list.
And if you enjoyed this post and you want to learn more about how you grow your business and start making $10K…$20K…or even $50K+ per month like my students do, then I invite you to sign up for a complete FREE Income Kickstarter Strategy Session with my 7 figure coach.
Inside this session, you will get a custom made blueprint on how you can achieve your income targets within the next 60-90 days. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out or you are already making nice profits in your business…we will help you get to where you want to be.
Sign up for the Income Kickstarter Strategy Session (spots are limited).
Dedicated To Multiplying Your Income
– Shaqir Hussyin
“On A Mission To Create 100 Millionaires In The Next 3 Years”
Get Done For You Traffic @SoloAdsAgency.com
Get Done For You Sales Funnel @GURU Funnels.com
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